Dana Clancy is a painter and Assistant Professor at Boston University's School of Visual Arts. She received a BA in English Literature from Vassar College in 1992, and an MFA in Painting from Boston University in 1999.

Ms. Clancy has exhibited her work in group exhibitions nationally, including the New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles, Delta Axis at Marshall Arts, Memphis, and Bowery Gallery, New York. Locally in New England, her work has been shown at Green Street Gallery, Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, FPAC Gallery, the South Shore Art Center, and ArtSPACE@16, and is in the permanent collection at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. In 2002 she was the recipient of the Clowes Award, a full-scholarship residency to the Vermont Studio Center. Her work is included in New American Paintings #68, Northeastern Edition.

My paintings are about observing and being observed. In my portraits I combine observational painting with pattern, invented color, and flattened space in order to suggest the inner life of the subject while drawing the viewer's attention to his or her own act of looking at the painting.

I often use a rounded shape within my paintings to strengthen the viewer's sensation of peering in or looking at a subject elliptically. I am interested in how this shape can allude to a lens or screen that brings the world closer while distancing it through a filter. I also like the visual opposition of an organic shape against a regular, rectangular support or wall.

Since 2003 my work has also explored the broader theme of the culture of spectacle and spectating that pervades contemporary life even as we seek out contemplative experiences. Another series of current work depicts museum audiences congregating along balconies and passing through modern exhibition spaces. By elevating the point of view and juxtaposing near and far space in the painting, I call attention to the viewer's position as a spectator whose observation mirrors the subject of the paintings. As with my portraits, the museum paintings contrast closeness and distance, form and flatness, and what is seen and what is hidden as a way to explore the act of looking.